WIP Young Miniatures Arabian Knight bust

[MalcC]

Phil, your detailing work is awesome, this is going to be a stunner when its complete.

Malc

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody,

Nigel, Simon, Nap, and Malc... thanks for the kind words - very appreciated!

This post will be a relatively short post on the shield that comes with the bust. It'll also be a nice change of pace going from fabrics to metallics. Lets dive right into it...


For the first bits, the paints used were:


(From L to R)

• Ivory Black (Williamsburg) - Used for our shadows
• Neutral Tint (Old Holland) - Also used for our shadows, this will give them a little bit of a violet shade
• White Gold (Schmencke Mussini) - Main silver metallic color
• Zinc White (Old Holland) - Ignore this... I have no idea why it's in the picture?!

As the shield is fairly flat and circular, we're going to go with a radial lighting scheme. This will essentially cut the shield into alternating pie pieces of light, dark, light, dark, etc... In our case the lightest will be the piece of the pie at the top of the shield. (this will make much more sense when you see it ). If the shield was more convex or bowed shaped, then I probably wouldn't go for this kind of scheme. I would probably go for something closer to what you'd see on a sphere.

After figuring this out, let's go ahead and paint in our lights:


Seeing the pic, it should be obvious now what I mean by radial lighting. What's really nice about this kind of lighting scheme is that it becomes very, very clear where the shadows should go now . Let's add them and blend them in:


Here I decided I wanted to add a little warmth and some extra tonality to the transition areas so I blended in a little bit of Transparent Brown (Schmincke Mussini) between all the highlight and shadow borders:


You can also see that I added an additional highlight area in the middle of the shadow area on the right, bottom part of the shield. It helped break things up and add a little bit more complexity to the lighting.

Now that we have our basic lights and shadows applied, I wanted to really bring out all the inlay detail in the shield. So, we do an intermediary step of black lining all the major areas and details. This was done using pure Ivory Black with some additional Linseed oil added to thin it down a bit:


I think that helps quite a bit in making the details stand out. At this step for some reason, I skipped the inner ring of inlays, but that will be fixed in a minute .

Now were going to highlight some additional details using gold colors. First we painted in a base tone using Bronze Iridescent paint from Williamsburg:


Next we highlighted this in deliberate areas with Classic Gold from Schmincke's Norma Oil line:


In additional to the additional gold highlights, here you can see that I went back and added the black lining to the inner ring. Let's add some more highlights:


This round of highlights was adding in Iridescent White from Winsor & Newton into the Classic Gold, and then applying this into a smaller section of the previously area.

To finish the shield off, I added more highlights of pure Iridescent White into selected areas over the entire shield, and highlighted small areas and parts of all the inlays:



That's it for the shield. Next is the Turban - which you can see is finished in the photo above...

Thanks for reading!

Regards,
-Phil

 

[Steve Ski]

Mighty awesome SBS, Phil, superb, as usual. I like the metallic shading technique, sweet!

 

[NigelR]

Great work on the shield. It's amazing how you do that with oils.....

 

[clubcat]

Outstanding, Phil
Melanie

 

[Malkie]

I must apologise for missing this, but I am here now and greatly impressed by what you have done this far.

Malkie

 

[Nap]

Hi Phil

As all have commented above it’s a from me

You’ve got a great way of describing the processes used and that with the pics really highlights the painting steps and result

Great update

Looking for more !

Happy brushes

Nap

 

[phil_h]

Hello Everybody!

Thanks for the comments and likes everybody. As always, they're very much appreciated!

In today's post, we'll be talking about an area that I think a lot of painters (very much including myself) have trouble with... painting hands. (I know I mentioned we'd be doing the turban in the last post, but it turns out, I don't have any WIP pics that are worthwhile.) Specifically somewhat realistic hands at larger scales. For scales below 90mm, you can get away with a more basic approach, and in many cases, it can still look great. However, once you start going larger, depending on how prominently placed they are, you'll be forced to add more detail to the hands if you want them to look finished. In many cases they just look unfinished. I've seen highly skilled modelers (award winning modelers), who have painted a fantastic figure or bust, and then you look at the hands and you're like, "...wtf??"

Unfortunately, this 200mm bust has a hand that is placed very prominently - right in the front and center of the bust. There is no getting around this, we'll have to find a way to make sure our hand is painted in as much detail as needed to match the rest of the bust and keep everything consistent.

The paints, skin tone palette, and mixes used for the hand are the exact same exact ones used for the face. Please see this post here for all the details.

Our first order of business is to base coat the hand with our mid-tone. Here we are:


So far so good. One thing that I should mention is that I'm not paying too much attention to the inside of the hand and the parts that will be holding the sword - you can't see them . I should also mention (again) how important it is to get clean, even coverage for our basecoat. Unfortunately, it's after this step that it all usually goes downhill...

Next up are shadows. It's entirely arbitrary if you want to start with either highlights or shadows (we started with highlights in our shield for example). Let's go ahead and block it in and smooth out our first shadow:


We don't want anything too dark... yet. In terms of placement, we're going with the natural recessed areas - there are lots of curves, crevices and whatnot with hands - the final placement really depends on how they're facing and how you want to light them. Next we're going to apply some deeper shadows inside the areas of this first shadow. In some places - like in between the fingers for example, we're going to paint an even darker third shadow. Lets take a look:

The deeper shadows really bring out the forms and volumes of the hand. In this photo you can also see that a general highlight was added to the upwards facing parts of the hand. I do want to mention that aside from a broader general highlight, since only the very top of the hand is directly facing the light source, most of the hand won't go past this highlight in value.

OK, aside from putting in another highlight at the top most part of the hand, we got our lights, we got our shadows... but this thing isn't even close to looking like a real hand. Lets briefly cover what's missing and what we should think about at this point:

• I think the biggest thing missing would the wrinkled texture you see all up and down our fingers - especially in the knuckle areas, etc... They are definitely large enough that they would be seen at this scale.
• Nails and their details should also be included at this scale too
• Subtle differences in tonality that need accounted for
• For a middle eastern man this age, he would definitely have hair on the back of his hands, so we'll need to deal with this as well...

This all adds up to quite a bit of extra work... with a huge scope for messing it all up .

So, lets start with the wrinkles and texture on the fingers:

• We'll paint small lines randomly starting between the top and bottom of each finger. However, we need to be careful what color we paint these lines.
• Areas on and close to the knuckles will get lines that are more reddish in tone, while the rest of the areas on the finger will get a more brownish, neutral tone.
• The size of the lines will also be fairly random - but the knuckle areas will have a greater distribution of larger, longer lines.

Lets take our first couple of steps:


Here we can see our work starting out on the bottom two fingers. Not bad so far... you can already see how much of a difference just this alone makes between these fingers and the ones without it. Since this seems to be promising, let's continue on:


There we go - that's all the fingers. However, we're not quite finished yet:

• In many cases, the wrinkles are too stark - we need to integrate them tighter into our skin tone (this will be handled on a subsequent step)
• These lines will constantly be tweaked from this point until we're finished

At this point, I decided to work on the nails. Here is a detail from the thumb:




Using the existing skin tone mixes, I made a slightly more pinker tone, which provided the base color of the nail. Our regular skin tone highlight color provided the dead part of the nail at the top, and the nail crescent (I'm sure there is a real name for this) at the bottom. The entire nailbed was outlined using pure French Burnt Umber. In addition, from this angle, you can see the additional highlight that was added on the part of the hand that is directly facing the sun.

Here is another pic of the nails for the rest of the fingers:


In the pic below, we've finished our nails and initial wrinkles. Here we're going to let everything dry, and then come back for the rest.



Now that everything is dry, if we look at the photo above, one thing that sticks out (at least to me), is that the skin tone itself is lacking some secondary skin tones and some color nuance. With this in mind we're going to glaze in some additional colors (mainly orange, yellow and red) to help give the skin tone more depth and richness. This step will also help integrate the wrinkles/texture on the fingers into hand. Let's take a look:

• Things are a lot more nice and subtle now . The colors used for this were various combinations of:
• Transparent Red Oxide (Williamsburg Oils)
• Transparent Yellow Oxide (Williamsburg Oils)
• Dutch Brown (Basically Transparent Brown Oxide - also from Williamsburg Oils)

We're getting close to the end. We'll let all this dry, and move onto the last and final step, which is the hair.

Painting the hair can be quite troublesome. For me, the key things are:

• The length and width of the hairs - obviously they need to be very thin, and not too long
• The color of the hairs
• The distribution of the hairs. This is actually the one that in many cases can make the biggest difference in terms of realism. If you have to little it just looks weird, and if you have too much, you kill the effect and it just looks like a weird blob on the hand.

Our strategy will be as follows:

• For the top of the hand, the hair will be more sparse, and lighter in color. In this case, we'll be using pure French Burnt Umber.
• As we go down the hand we will increase the amount of hair by extending the hairs out towards the fingers, and painting them darker. Here we will have a mix of the brown hair as above, and black hair that is painted using pure Ivory Black
• The bottom will have the most hair and it will be all black.

Keep in mind, there is no right or wrong way to distribute the hair - it just has to long natural and organic. Lets take a look:


With the hair complete, that finishes our hand! Here is the same photo blown up to 250% larger (because it's hard to see all the detail):


Hopefully you found that interesting!

Thanks for reading!

Regards,
-Phil